


How a Good Time Ended

by PeniG



Series: Akashic Records [3]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Briar Patch, Demons are Bullies, It may not be enough comfort, Other, Prehistorical, antedilivian, they've got 5000 years to go here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-08
Updated: 2019-08-08
Packaged: 2020-08-13 05:43:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20169100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeniG/pseuds/PeniG
Summary: In the Millenium between Eden and the Flood, they don't need an Arrangement, but they manage pretty well. Too bad Envy is an earnestly cultivated sin.





	How a Good Time Ended

Crawly wasn’t fond of traveling in human form, but it didn’t do to let the people who’d offered him hospitality see him transform into a big black snake, so he walked out of the large mudbrick homestead on his own two dodgy feet, alongside the flock of goats and a kid he’d taught to cheat at knucklebones. “But how do you get to be a peddler?” the kid asked.

Crawly shrugged under the load of his improbably large pack. “Get a bunch of stuff together and start? That’s the hard part. Probably the easiest thing is to find an old peddler who’s getting past it, volunteer to help him, and inherit all his stuff when he dies.”

“Would _you_ like a helper?”

“You don’t want to wait around as long as it’ll take for me to die,” Crawly assured him. “Go run your goats!” The boy whistled up his dog and they drove the flock up into the hills as Crawly set off down the footpath toward the next settlement east.

He felt on top of the world. Traveling aside, he’d had a good time the last few decades, moving from one group of people to another, spreading rumors about what this settlement thought of that settlement, inciting lust in a young married human here, avarice in a head of household there, acting out among the kids everywhere he went. Kids were great. Tireless chaos bombs, the lot of them. The goatboy had taught him a song whose last line looped back around seamlessly to the first line, so that it could be sung on endless repeat until someone started screaming. He whistled the tune, loud and pure and resonant, to lodge it firmly in his head; and heard it whistled back at him from the warm green heights.

Yeah, this was the life. Hell didn’t send him assignments often, preferring to let the Serpent of Eden do his own thing in hopes of another innovation or two. Settlements were seldom more than a day or so’s human walk apart. The material goodies he carried guaranteed him a welcome everywhere, and also allowed him to keep up with the latest trends. Bow drills to make fire, glazed pottery decorated with charming designs, hammered metal knives and ornaments, plant parts and animal hair dyed fantastic colors and woven into anything you liked, devices that made music - they were all so clever, he couldn’t get enough!

And yes, sometimes he’d arrive at a settlement, and that pesky angel would be there, his medicines as welcome as Crawly’s gewgaws. That pesky, anxious, pretty angel, with his blue eyes that were as strange to the locals as Crawly’s yellow ones, his disapproving frown, his delighted smile, his laugh like soap bubbles, his continual flustered consternation over whether he was _allowed_ to enjoy himself as much as he did.

Tempting people was harder around Aziraphale, because he made his hosts feel good, and contented people are harder to tempt than discontented ones. But going head to head with him, trying to keep one step ahead of him, to slip in a temptation he wasn’t prepared to counter, even to make him a vector of temptation (like that time Crawly’d persuaded every single woman in one household to attempt to seduce him), was _so much fun_!

The constraints of human living generally meant that they shared a sleeping space, and much as Crawly enjoyed a nap now and again, it was even more enjoyable to pull up a winejar or a beer cask and break out a couple of cups in a design the angel hadn’t seen before, and sit up all night talking. Aziraphale vented about the time he’d had to spend untangling the knots of ill-will and bad consequences Crawly left in his wake; and Crawly complained about how much harder his life had been made by some blessing or advice the angel had handed out, getting a kick out of watching Aziraphale’s face try not to be smug. What might have become a dreary routine turned into a splendid game, in which he could track points, and not always be sure of coming out ahead in a round. Pity that wanker Gabriel kept yanking the angel back to Heaven to receive instructions, run this errand, bless this well, as if Aziraphale didn’t know his own business by now.

The footpath curved past a grove of cedars. Crawly checked the hills, and saw the last of the herd crossing the ridge. Good, nobody to see him from any vantage now. He stepped off the footpath to the cedar shade and slipped off his pack, popping his shoulder joints and cracking his neck in preparation for shifting shape. He was about to slip into his alternate form when power surged under his feet, and the air suddenly stank of rotten eggs.

Oh, crap. Special instructions incoming. Well, it was a couple of decades since he’d gotten any. Mustn’t grumble. Wouldn’t do for Hell's emissaries to find him tamely awaiting their pleasure, though. He pulled a cup-and-ball game out of his pack and stretched out, using the pack as a pillow, crossing his feet at the ankles. By the time the ground crumbled upward, he was whistling the endless loop song and tossing the ball to catch it in the cup, or to miss and try again. When Hastur and Ligur pulled themselves out of the ground he smiled airily and waved, wishing Ligur to the far side of the moon. Hastur was all right on his own, but when he hung around Ligur, it was as if he turned over custody of his single brain cell.

“Hail Satan,” they said in unison, looking down at him. Ligur was darker and Hastur paler than when he’d last seen them, their eyes more pronounced, and their robes smelled of rotting meat as well as brimstone.

“Hail Satan,” said Crawly. “How’re things in Hell?”

“Hellish,” said Ligur.

“Let us recite the deeds of the day,” said Hastur, who liked formulas and routines. “Ligur and I have been disturbing the dead and putting the fear of ghouls into people.”

“Ooh, nice one,” said Crawly. “That’ll give those stories I’ve been telling some legs, yeah?” He hadn’t invented the stories. They’d started cropping up on their own last century, and he’d repeated them to Hell for a giggle. Beelzebub was taken with the idea. “I haven’t done anything in particular today so far,” he said, “but last night I started a fight between twin brothers, over a girl who doesn’t care two pins about either of ‘em. Some good clan war potential there, I think. And check this out: _The goat went up the hillside, the goat went up the hillside, the goat went up the hillside, and what do you think he saw? He saw another hillside, he saw another hillside, he saw another hillside, and what do you think he did? The goat went up the hillside, the goat went up the hillside, the goat went up the hillside, and what do you think he saw? He saw another hillside, he saw another hillside, he saw another hillside, and what do you think he did?”_

They stared at him blankly, blankness turning gradually to glowers. Crawly had to give them credit - their glowers were first-rate. But if they thought they could beat him in a battle of wills they had another think coming. He got through another ten repetitions before they cracked. “Enough!” Ligur roared. “We didn’t come here to listen to music!”

“Is that what music sounds like?” Hastur asked. “I don’t think I like it.”

“No accounting for tastes,” said Crawly. “But I didn’t mean to waste your valuable time. If not for music, what did you come here for? Message from Beelzebub?”

Ligur smiled, a slow smile that reminded Crawly that Ligur’d been a jackass back when he was Michael’s right-hand-angel in Heaven, and that Hell hadn’t improved him. “No, we have a message from _us_!” He zapped out his tongue - an eight-foot-long tongue, and sticky, so that when it struck Crawly solidly in the face and then retracted, it dragged him half the distance before he could brace himself enough to tear free.

“See, the thing is, Crawly,” said Hastur, with the ponderous slowness of one who has memorized his lines, “you think you’re better’n us.”

_Never, ever again,_ Crawly thought, _be off your feet when demons come calling_! But he was not going to be driven to scrambling! Which meant, no standing - his feet were not in a cooperative mood. He started shifting shape, but Ligur’s tongue wrapped itself around his head this time, and then Hastur ran in to kick him hard in the gut, disrupting the shift. “You think you’re hot stuff,” said Hastur, emphasizing his points with kicks, “the Serpent of Eden, swanning around up here, doing whatever you please! No stewing in Hell for _you_, oh no! You come down to Hell, get petted and cooed over, lord it over everybody, and then off upstairs again! _You’re_ Satan’s little pet snake!”

Crawly managed the transformation at last, expanding his girth and his jaw enough to break Ligur’s hold and lunge, but Ligur, it turned out, had a knife. A nasty one, which stabbed in through scales and all, and ripped even as he got a fang into Hastur and expelled his venom sac.

“But Satan’s not here now, is he?” Ligur took up the thread of discourse as Hastur screamed. “And your commendations don’t make very good armor, do they? How does it feel, getting worked over by a couple of_ real_ demons?”

Hastur produced his own knife, dripping with his own venom.

Shitshitshit! Crawly retreated, spine against a tree, and transformed again. The wound in his side did not feel any better for it. He held out his empty hands in a placating gesture. “Guys, guys, guys,” he said, getting his best ingratiating smile into place, “_c’mon_, we’re all the same, I know that! All ordered around by the same bosses! I don’t pick my jobs any more than you do! You don’t think I _like_ it up here, do you?”

“We _know_ you do,” said Hastur, moving to Crawly’s left.

“You _volunteer_ for things,” said Ligur, moving to his right. “Make us look bad.”

Mentally he rummaged through the pack at his feet, looking for something useful. Knives that’d last maybe three heartbeats against hellforged starmetal; a full waterskin that’d be no good unless the water in it had been holy; a variety of whole spices which might be irritating if ground fine and rubbed into their eyes; some lovely little pots and cups and plates that they might enjoy breaking; linen; toys; ribbons; beads; bow drills; oh, he was screwed sideways. “What? No! _I_ can’t make _you_ look bad! The only person_ I_ can make look bad is _myself_! You two are a couple of the most respected demons in Hell!”

“Then why are we sent on errands _you_ thought up?” Ligur asked. “Ghouls! That’s one of yours!”

“Then your beef’s with Beelzebub! I just told zzir the story, I didn’t think up your mission!” Salt! He had a bag of salt, right down in the bottom of the pack, but even if he could miracle it out he could only get one of them with it, the way they’d split up. “Take it up with zzir! If you like I can put in a good word for you. Hastur, buddy, c’mon, we’ve had some good times together, you _know_ I’m not like that!”

Hastur struck. Crawly moved, miracling the salt out of the bottom of the pack and into the path of his opponent’s face, bolting as fast as he could, surging into snake form. But Ligur pounced on his back, and no amount of twisting or turning would shake him off as he clung to the hilt of his blade, dug in far too deep, far too close to vertebrae. Hastur, howling, charged blindly in pursuit, stabbing the end of Crawly’s tail by sheer luck. The poison burned up his already tortured nerve endings and shocked him out of snake form again, which at least left Ligur several feet behind him, and he ran, but realized that he was heading back toward the settlement.

Not pausing to reflect on why this struck him as a big fat Nope, Crawly swerved, losing ground even before the effects of the venom and wounds slowed him. He tried to miracle the wounds closed, but mending was harder than destroying and they seemed to be resisting him. Ligur tackled him in the long grass by the footpath. “What would our masters think of their lapsnake if they saw you _now_? What kind of star-turn demon lets himself be ambushed and cut up?”

All right, he was getting discorporated today; and the only thing he had any hope of salvaging was some vestige of his rep. His head swam and Ligur’s face seemed first very far away, then very close, then very far away again. The pains in his back and side merged into a single hideous pain too great for screaming. So he smiled instead. “I dunno,” he said. “The kind a couple of two-bit grunt demons are afraid to tackle one-on-one?”

“Let me discorporate him,” said Hastur, appearing behind Ligur, wiping salt out of his eyes. “I want to.”

_“No,_” said Ligur. “We _talked_ about this. We discorporate him, it’s over. We torture him. We leave him by the side of the road, an inch from discorporating. Send demons up looking for him. Make him _beg_ for help. Let everyone _see_ what a poser he is. Remember?”

“I _really_ want to discorporate him.”

“_I_ don’t. I want to _destroy_ him. I want to peel him like we peeled Verrine.” He held his knife in front of Crawly’s eyes. “Remember Verrine?”

Oh, he remembered Verrine, of course he did, the one who’d picked herself up from Falling and sashayed up to Lucifer and said: _This was a bad idea. I told you not to push so hard! I for one am going to march right back up and apologize!_ “I remember it took six demons to restrain her while you did it,” said Crawly, head swimming. “And I remember you were _authorized_. There was a trial, remember? You peel me down to nothing without a trial, there won’t be much left of _you_, either. And what’re you going to try me for? Doing my job better than you do yours?”

“I didn’t say I was going to _do_ it. I said I _wanted_ to.” He wagged the knife; or maybe that was the venom. “But all I’m _going_ to do is teach you a lesson.”

“Now, now, you have to actually know something before you can teach anything,” said Crawly, which was when Hastur kicked him again and Ligur stuck the knife under his fingernail.

The next period of time was both short and endless, like the circular song, and kept phasing in and out. Crawly suspected Hastur had inadvertently (Or not? He was following Ligur’s lead here, but they_ had_ had good times together once, maybe he wasn’t as all in with this as he appeared) done him a favor with the venom, as it was definitely a hallucinogen, and pain that turned into vivid light smearing across the back of his throat was, not exactly easy to shrug off, but somewhat less perceptible as pain. On the whole, Falling had hurt more, but compared to not screaming, getting a houseful of women to make passes at Aziraphale hadn’t been a big accomplishment. Aziraphale was a highly suitable candidate for seduction; but not screaming when the pain was this bad, that didn’t make any sense _at al_l, except that the determination not to do so was all that he had to cling to, until the warmth started.

_Painpainpainpain_, but a small, tight-curled portion of him in the back of his brain uncurled a bit, turned toward the warmth, and said, “Oh. He’s back,” in that pleased way it always did; at which another bit of his brain thought, “He doesn’t have his sword,” and it wasn’t a joke anymore, not something to taunt him with on greeting, it was a deep fearsome horrible thought, because Hastur and Ligur? Getting the jump on an angel? A _swordless_ angel? He was strong, sure, Crawly’d seen him wade into the middles of brawls between burly men who could lift grown sheep over their heads and push them apart with one hand on each chest, talking mildly and reasonably the whole time, but Ligur and Hastur, they had blades, they had venom, they had no room for mild reasonable talk, they’d have a _field day_ -

And _now_ he was screaming.

“_That’s_ more like it,” grinned Hastur. “That’s what we like to hear, Crawly, good boy. Now beg us nicely to stop.”

“_He’s coming!_” Crawly screamed. “Quick, take me to Hell _now_, before he gets here!”

They blinked down at him, suddenly in focus, because what was demonic frog venom compared to the simultaneous rallying of every synapsis in his brain? He grabbed Ligur by the collar of his robe and screamed into his face. “You idiot! Don’t you _feel_ that? _He’s coming_! If he sees us we’re all done for!”

“He who?” Ligur asked.

“An angel’s coming,” said Hastur.

Crawly heard himself manage a crazed laugh that ended in a wail - pretty impressive, and he doubted he’d ever be able to reproduce it. “Not an angel! _Aziraphale_! He’ll smell demon blood when he gets to earth, he’ll be here any minute, we have to_ leave_!”

“What, the angel they always have countering you? He’s never even used his sword, you coward.”

“Because he doesn’t_ need_ to! He’s got more power in his _eyes_ than most angels or demons have in their whole bodies! He looks at you and your bones turn to water, your brains turn to mush, you turn inside out! _He spits holy water_! I can barely stand up to him when I’m at full strength and thanks to you I’m_ not_!”

“I’m not afraid of anybody’s eyes,” said Hastur.

“The more fool you!”

Ligur looked uncertain, but he said: “I think three demons are a match for one angel.”

“Fine, _you_ face him, then! It’ll serve you right, you envious lowlives! But leave me out of it! Shove me down to Hell, discorporate me, do something, anything! _Peel me like Verrine!_ But do it quick, before he gets here!”

An alert aura. A concerned aura. A Guardian Angel aura which needed to _not_ encounter these two.

“He probably _would_ bring the flaming sword out for three of us,” said Ligur. “I’ve been smitten before. Smote? Smited? It’s not nice. And everybody makes fun of you for decades afterward.”

“Not like Crawly counts in a fight at the best of times,” said Hastur; but he was smiling. “You know. We don’t have to be here. And we don’t have to take Crawly with us.”

Crawly clutched him with desperate hands. “Please, no, don’t leave me here _alone_ for _him_ to find!”

“Let go of me! Have a little dignity.”

“Who cares about dignity? This is Aziraphale, dammit, dignity won’t do me a bit of good!” His voice caught in a good imitation of a sob. “Please, I’m _begging_ you, I’ll do _anything_, just_ don’t leave me here for him_!”

“You know what,” said Ligur. “My arm’s getting tired anyway. Let’s go. We’ll come back in a day or two. Scrape up anything that’s left.”

They sank into the earth, but not far enough, they needed to be right _away_, Aziraphale was almost here, he was - oh, he was running, which didn’t suit him at all, how sweet - hey, what if he twisted their aura perception a bit - didn’t know he could do that, brilliant - yeah, _that_ spooked ‘em, didn’t know what to do with all that radiance, did they? They were retreating now, no sense of them at all and here was Aziraphale -

Crawly started laughing, writhing in agony and amusement at the same time. He had ichor and pain in his eyes, couldn’t see a thing, but he didn’t have to. An anxious concentrated glow warmed him, its proximity making the pain back off; but the venom was kicking in again. He felt his lips writhe, heard himself croak: “Hi, angel! Where’sss your sssword?”

“Hush, now, hold still!” One hand held him down at the shoulder; the other passed over the wounded back. “Oh, my! Crawly, these wounds are cursed! I’ll have to lift those before anything else. Hold still, please. This will sting a bit.”

“Whatever you sss - AIEEEE!!”

Sting,_ hell,_ it was like having his skin ripped off, but only for an instant and then Aziraphale’s hand passed over the back wound again and oh, yes, that was _lovely_, thank you angel, only he couldn’t thank an angel, and what spilled out of his mouth was something mangled past being words.

“Stop trying to talk. You’re distracting me. I’ve never dealt with anything like this before. I’ve got to decurse the side, now - that’s right, hang on and be brave for me -“ _Rip_, AIEEEEE!_ Heal_. “Very good, now, I think I see how to get all the remaining curses at once, but you won’t enjoy it. Deep breath. Nod when you’re ready.”

“Jussst do it!”

RIP. _Arrrrrrgh! Heal, heal, heal_, steady voice telling him he was brave, everything would be fine; steady hands passing over each locus of pain, brushing them off him like dust, wiping the ichor out of his eyes. The sun was too bright, too bright. Crawly laughed and couldn’t stop.

“All right, that’s the worst of it. People are coming. Crawly? Listen. You’ve been poisoned. I’m going to neutralize that and then you’ll only have bruising, all right? They’re armed people. I think we’d better say you were set upon by bandits?”

“Bandits. Yes. Two of ‘em. Envious bastards.” He felt the venom fizz throughout his body, then stop. Now he could see straight, straight into anxious blue eyes.

And his bones turned to water.

And his brains turned to mush.

And he turned inside out.

But that was all right. That was just how it felt to look at the angel. His personal, pretty, pesky angel. He felt a smile smear itself across his face.

Aziraphale rocked back on his heels, looking shocked. “_Crawly_ -“

“What? What did I do? Did I say something? I don’t remember saying anything.”

But here were men striding up waving straight heavy perfectly-balanced sticks that could dislocate a joint or smash a head, led by the father of the herdboy. “Unhand that - oh! Aziraphale! What happened to the peddler?”

“Bandits,” said Aziraphale. “They ran away.”

“You scared ‘em off,” Crawly assured him, giggling. “Very scary, you are.”

“More likely they had a lookout who saw the cries had drawn assistance.”

“They can’t have gotten far,” said one of the twins.

“Search, but no fewer than two together,” said the father, bending over Crawly as his sons, nephews, and brothers dispersed to seek bandits. “He can barely walk normally; don’t know how he gets around under that pack of his. He’ll never manage on his own after a beating. Shall I help you carry him back to the house?”

“I can manage him, if you’ll carry my medicine bag. I think he’s taken some blows to the head.” As the father collected the pack of bandages, herbs, amulets, and whatever else Aziraphale carted around in his human persona, the angel took Crawly by the chin. “Stop laughing! How many fingers am I holding up?”

“I _can’t_!” Crawly wheezed. “Four and a _ha_ thumb, with _wheeze_ two in the air and three-_hee-hee_ curled under.” He dropped his voice to a stuttering laughing whisper: “_I told ‘em you sspat ho-ho-holy water_!”

“No double vision, but I’m _sure_ you’re concussed.”

“I’m _fine_!” But he couldn’t stop laughing; and when Aziraphale picked him up he laughed harder. His sides hurt from the outside in, from being kicked, and now they were starting to hurt from the inside out, from the laughing jag.

“Hush,” said Aziraphale, carrying him down the footpath to the steading. “You’re all right.” But he didn’t sound like he should. Where was that_ tone_, that special private tone that only Crawly ever heard? Why was he speaking as he would to a human he was tending, but didn’t know personally? Crawly didn’t like it. The laughing trailed off into hiccups. His head hurt, and the sun was too bright. He was glad to have eyelids.

Once at the settlement the women rallied round and had him tucked into the big bed with a wet cloth on his eyes and his robes stripped off so fast he barely had time to reshape his body to have all the appropriate features. Aziraphale, true to his habit, conferred with the grandmother of the house and let her lead the way on what treatment was suitable. It was a free will philosophy thing they’d talked about at length. He wasn’t supposed to cure people willy-nilly because they had to figure out medicine for themselves, to keep them busy or something. So he’d follow the most experienced healer’s lead, even when the treatments were rubbish, and only dispute her if they became actively harmful. 

In this case that meant the grandmother was the one rubbing his sore sides with arnica-laced fat while Aziraphale placed amulets and chanted supposedly magical verses. Crawly would rather it be the other way around. But he made a facetiously lewd suggestion anyway, because the grandmother’d been a widow for two years and liked it when young men flirted with her. One of the daughters brought him a hot bitter drink and held his head while he got it down, and Aziraphale didn’t say a word to him, only: “He needs quiet,” to the grandmother. “We’ll keep the children outside.”

That was no fun. But his head hurt. Crawly went to sleep. He woke up once, when one of the twins crept to the bedside and, seeing his eyes open, whispered: “We got your pack back. They must have dropped it. Almost nothing broke, though.”

“Thanks, kid.” He tested a few movements. He was stiff, and sore, but not as much as a human would have been in a similar situation. Aziraphale, unnaturally pale in the interior dimness, loomed at the foot of the bed. Crawly smiled at him.

Aziraphale looked stern. “Rest,” he commanded. Crawly fell asleep again, only waking once more when he heard the angel’s voice; but he was talking about parasites, both human and goat, so it wasn’t worth staying awake when he could sleep and dream of that voice telling him he was brave and funny, sharing cold clay cups of dark red wine under a cherry tree in Eden.

When he woke next, Aziraphale was gone, and no one in the household agreed in which direction he had walked.

\---

_Oh, Lord, Lord, what had he done?_

Aziraphale usually enjoyed his summer walks through the wide grass lands and farming country, with butterflies and ground-nesting birds flushing at his passing, wildflowers blooming thick as stars in the Milky Way; but today he saw everything through a film of dismay. He loved a good paradox, but this was a _bad_ paradox, one that cut much too close to the bone.

Demons couldn’t love. They just - they _couldn’t_. The capacity had been torn out of them with their Grace in the Fall. Therefore, he _couldn’t_ have sensed it rolling off of Crawly at him in a great wave. Except that he knew perfectly well what love felt like and that _was_ what he’d sensed.

And it wasn’t the first time he’d sensed it, either. This was only the first time he couldn’t sweep it under the rug of his mind. Normally he met up with Crawly when their paths crossed in the company of humans, and humans were _always_ loving. Even in households where sin had infected love with possessiveness, jealousy, and other corruptions, the ambiance was always there. It was his chief resource for straightening out the knots of bad choices Crawly’s temptations left in his wake. He knew love the way a workman knows his tools, the way a musician knows a tune. He loved this world, he loved his humans, he loved his fellow angels, he loved God, he loved and loved and _loved_, it was what he was_ for_, he _couldn’t_ be mistaken.

“Envious bastards,” Crawly had said, looking straight at him, smiling like a bride smiling at a groom, like a gray-headed patriarch smiling at a wrinkled matriarch singing the song she’d sung on their wedding day.

Oh, this was impossible. As impossible as it was real.

And he couldn’t even ask himself _how_ it had happened. With the result in front of him, the process was no mystery. Decades, centuries, every time they ran across each other, even when they’d spend the whole time pushing and pulling influences - tempt, thwart, tempt, thwart - Aziraphale kept forgetting that Crawly was a demon. Kept treating him like a friend. They had - they had rituals, catch phrases, _private jokes_! As if the Mission were a game and the Earth a vast playground! Crawly even teased him about the flaming sword, of all the things that _should_ have pulled him up short and reminded him of the seriousness of Everything.

And when they were serious - oh, Lord. When they _were_ serious, sitting up over cups of beer or wine or whatever the household afforded, talking in the dark about stars and time and Heaven’s policies and Hell’s, when Crawly’d speak aloud the identical questions that crossed Aziraphale’s mind unspoken - that was Temptation. As was every time they laughed at something only they two remembered; as was every time Crawly let him steal some choice tidbit right off Crawly’s plate; as was the feeling of triumph every time Crawly acknowledged himself bested.

He’d come straight down from Heaven, another lecture and a new errand from Gabriel fresh in his head, heard Crawly screaming - and off he’d gone, not thought twice about it, to rescue his dearest enemy from the Enemy. He could imagine what Gabriel’d have to say about _that_!

It was a reflex, though - relieving suffering was half of what he did!

As Temptation was rather _more_ than half of what Crawly did. Did he Tempt Aziraphale on reflex? Or was it - oof. Love could be twisted to selfishness, to sin. In a Demon, it, well, once he’d impossibly gotten into it, how could he _not_ twist it? Was he Tempting Aziraphale to Fall, as the only means of keeping his beloved with him?

No, Crawly would _never_ \- and the thought raised a chorus of memory in him, a thousand years of wives children mothers siblings friends lovers, with black eyes, with bruises, bleeding, with broken bones, with broken hearts, with burns, dying - _my husband, my mother, my father, my brother, my sister, my best friend, my lover, would never_ \- Never was not a useful word.

And what, after all, was the alternative? For Crawly to wait, endlessly, quietly, desperately, loving someone he couldn’t have? A fish loving a bird? Forever? The idea of him existing like that was too awful. Aziraphale couldn’t do that to him.

Why had the demons been attacking him anyway? He couldn’t be mistaken about the nature of the curses he’d removed. Was it only politics as usual in Hell, brought up into the bright world because that was where Crawly lived? They didn’t talk about Hell, or Heaven, either; neither of them spent much time in their putative homes and neither of them wanted to hear about it, anyway. _Envious bastards_, he’d said; and maybe that was all it was, demons stuck down in the dark growing bitter against one who walked in the light. Or had they smelled the love on him, sensed a potential traitor in their midst, and come to remind him: _Angels can Fall, but Demons cannot Rise?_

If only he had someone to talk to about this! But how to explain even a tenth of the dense, textured reality of the situation to anyone, human or angel? Gabriel certainly wouldn’t listen for even a full minute, much less the hours that would be necessary to make anyone, however sympathetic, understand. The only entity with a hope of understanding was Crawly and - no. To look him in the eye and tell him, _You have to stop loving me, don’t torture yourself, I can’t love you back, it’s not allowed -_

He was too weak for that. Too weak to confess giving away his sword, too weak to guard Eden, too weak to carry out orders without questioning them in his heart, too weak to speak the questions aloud, too weak to be demon or angel, but here he was.

“I have to stop seeing him,” said Aziraphale, and found he had stopped walking. Barley fields to his left; an orchard to the right; rich summer smells, and larks singing. “If I’m not around, a hundred years, a thousand, he’ll wear it out. Stop feeling it. Learn to hate me, probably, and that’s probably the best possible outcome.” He pressed his hands together and looked up. “Please. _Is_ that the best possible outcome? I don’t want to hurt him. I don’t want him to hate me. But this isn’t about what I want. This is about him, about what’s possible and what’s not. Didn’t Falling hurt him _enough_? Aren’t colleagues who wound him and then curse the wounds against healing sufficient torment for _anybody_? _Can’t I help him at all?”_

The larks sang, the sun shone, a dust devil danced in the footpath, and he was alone.

-30-


End file.
